What Are You
Reading?
What Are You Reading? A project sponsored by the Friends of the Macomb Public Library District to encourage reading and book discussion in our community. Would you like to share your favorite books with other readers? Please send your name, occupation or grade level, book author and title, and a brief statement about the book and why you liked it to Kate Joswick, [email protected].
Reviewer’s Name: Galen Weitkamp Reviewer’s Occupation: Retired Book Title: Devil Reached Toward the Siy: An Oral History of the Making and Unleashing of the Atomic Bomb Book’s Author: Garrett M. Graff The subtitle says it all. There have been reams of interviews of people who live in Hanford, Oak Ridge and Los Alamos. People and their families who worked directly or only peripherally on the design and construction of the first atomic bomb. And there have been reams of interviews of people who lived in Hiroshima or Nagasaki who have experienced the horror of these devices first hand. Garett M. Graff collected and studied these sources and arranged them into a narrative about “the making and unleashing of the atomic bomb.” Instead of reproducing a whole interview, Garett gives us a sentence or two, or perhaps a paragraph, from one participant and then he gives us the point of view of another participant on the same topic. The book often reads like an active discussion between different people remembering a vivid shared experience from the past, whether it be working on a large group project or the nightmare aftermath of an unimaginable devastation. I sometimes wish humankind could forget all knowledge of nuclear weapons and how to make them: pry it away from the rest of our knowledge and bury it deep never to be discovered again. But that is impossible. Knowledge has same dual nature that we do. We can use our knowledge of the atom to cure cancer, photograph bone fractures and internal organs, generate energy to heat our homes, run our factories, or to energize warheads that can cleanse the Earth’s surface of life thirty times over. I’m not sure if it’s up to us, or just a few of us, or if it is already in the cards.
